November 25, 2009 The Fulford File, By James FulfordA Happy Thanksgiving To All VDARE.COM Readers!
Barack Hussein Obama has issued his
first
Thanksgiving Proclamation:
"What began as a
harvest celebration between European settlers and
indigenous communities nearly four centuries ago has
become our cherished tradition of Thanksgiving.”
Actually, they were
English settlers,
but it’s OK—the President was raised overseas in
Indonesia,
where they think of all white people as Europeans.
“As Americans, we
hail from every part of the world. While we observe
traditions from every culture, Thanksgiving Day is a
unique national tradition we all share. Its spirit binds
us together as one people, each of us thankful for our
common blessings.”
Aargh. But Obama
still
ends
his proclamations
the way
George Bush
did:
“IN WITNESS WHEREOF,
I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of
November, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and
of the Independence of the United States of America the
two hundred and thirty-fourth.
BARACK OBAMA” [Presidential Proclamation -- Thanksgiving Day, November
23, 2009]
The
War on Thanksgiving is happening, to get us all ready
for the
War
Against Christmas:
“Many educators are
striving to celebrate a more historically accurate
Thanksgiving, ditching the stereotypical
Pilgrim-and-Indian stories in favor of true social
studies lessons. Teachers say a nuanced approach helps
debunk popular myths and can add cultural awareness to
the holiday.”[Schools updating lessons on 1st Thanksgiving,
By Angie Leventis Lourgos, Chicago
Tribune, November 25, 2009]
Of
course, all this political correctitude isn’t actually
providing any new and interesting information to the
children, it’s just changing sides. And this has been
going on for some time.
A Christian Science Monitor story says
Thanksgiving Day:
Pilgrims were a surprisingly worldly, tolerant lot
[By Robert Marquand, November 25,
2009]
Okay,
surprising to whom? Surprising to everyone who’s been
victimized by anti-Pilgrim, anti-American propaganda for
years. The CSM story, after some stuff about Puritans and women’s rights, and
the multicultural neighbourhoods they lived in
seventeenth century
Leyden,
during their Dutch sojourn, says
“But
church historians have complained for decades that few
religious groups are more historically maligned and
misunderstood than Puritans.
“They are ignored
as unimportant precursors to the American Revolution: So
stripped of their religious nature had US history books
made the Pilgrims that one standard text in the 1980s
had only one line on them,
infamously
calling them
"people who take long trips."
“The
Pilgrim-Puritans are also slandered as zealots, the
taproot of all America's psychic repressions, phobias,
guilt, and drive. Historian
Edmund Morgan
complained that Puritans were depicted as severe figures
whose "only contribution to American culture is their
furniture."
“The religious
essayist and novelist Marilynne Robinson calls the
popular hostility ‘A great example of our collective
eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information
about the thing disparaged…’”
Gabriel Matthew Schivone, an Arizona
student, quotes Communist Howard Zinn in the
Arizona Wildcat:
“In a recent
interview with the Wildcat on the subject of popular
holidays such as Columbus Day, Veteran’s Day and
Thanksgiving, eminent historian Howard Zinn remarked
that, as Americans, ‘We celebrate the wrong things.’
“Veteran’s Day is
too often celebrated with a love of war and militarism.
Columbus Day
is often thought of (if at all) with reverence for
Christopher Columbus’ mythic heroism along with a
so-called 'spirit of discovery'
he and many like him represented— which was, in reality,
the unleashing of mass genocide,
disease
and European imperialism upon the land that would become
America.
“In this sense,
Thanksgiving (or ‘thanks-taking,’ as a friend of mine
refers to it) is the all-American holiday. But instead
of the usual mass gluttony and mindless consumerism,
this Thanksgiving we should try to understand what the
coming of the Puritans and other white Europeans meant
for the indigenous populations of North America (and
what it still means today for
indigenous
peoples all over the world,
from
Palestine
to our regional neighbors, the Tohono O’odham people):
extermination, displacement and ongoing repression.”
“Then perhaps we
can think about what each of us can do to transform
meaningless waste and mediocrity into meaningful change
and social creativity.” [Howard Zinn on Thanksgiving,
November 25, 2009] This is a (literal) textbook example of anti-American, anti-white prejudice. (If you’ve never heard of the Tohono O’odham, that’s because they’re the Papago Indians under another name. They’re mostly victimized by Mexican illegal aliens tramping through their territory and littering. ) Zinn’s textbooks are used in schools all over America. Daniel Flynn debunks most of what Zinn is saying here.
“Thus the Pequot violence against whites that led
to the war is almost entirely absent from the text. The
most Zinn can bring himself to admit is that ‘Massacres
took place on both sides.’ In fact, the author details
only the atrocities committed by one side: the Puritans.
While graphic descriptions of Puritan violence are
highlighted, Pequot atrocities are brushed aside. Here
are some examples not to be found in Zinn: ‘[T]hey took
two men out of a boat, and murdered them with ingenious
barbarity, cutting off first the hands of one of them,
then his feet,’
writes
19th century historian John Gorham Palfrey about the
Pequots’ assaults upon settlers. ‘Soon after, two men
sailing down the river were stopped and horribly
mutilated and mangled; their bodies were cut in two,
lengthwise, and the parts hung up by the river’s bank. A
man who had been carried off from Wethersfield was
roasted alive. All doubt as to the necessity of vigorous
action was over, when a band of a hundred Pequots
attacked that place, killed seven men, a woman, and a
child, and carried off two girls.’
As I wrote in 2007,
“Oddly enough,
many American Indians
were thankful for
the arrival of the Pilgrims. If you had been battling
other Indians with stone knives and wooden arrows for
hundreds of years, you'd be overjoyed to see potential
allies who had guns, even if they were only
matchlocks.” But if Indians and Communists aren’t thankful for the Pilgrim Fathers, the rest of us can be. As a more normal Arizona undergraduate writes on the same page as Gabriel Matthew Schivone:
“There are some things about the holiday that allow no negotiation. For
example, if your stuffing doesn’t have fresh apple
slices or cranberries in it, don’t even talk to me about
it. If you want to expound on early European settlers in
America and the terrible events that followed their
arrival, tell it to someone else. But if you want to
stuff your face so much that you have to wait three
hours just to eat dessert, now you’re talking about some
tender family bonding — and who doesn’t like that?” Happy Thanksgiving!
Previous VDARE.Com Thanksgiving Coverage Below:
11/21/01 - Thanksgiving: The National Question Footnote 11/27/02 - Thanksgiving, Crazy Horse, Us 02/08/01 - TODAY'S LETTER: A Reader Comments on Multi-Cultist Holidays 11/26/03 - Then They Came For Thanksgiving… 11/21/03 - View From Lodi, CA: Hot Chocolate For Thanksgiving 12/08/03 - War On Holidays Is War on America 11/23/04 - Grace, Gratitude, and God At Thanksgiving 11/19/04 - View From Lodi, CA: Mincemeat For Thanksgiving! 11/24/04 - The High Road to Turkey: An Indian View of Thanksgiving 09/25/03 - Pressure On The Pot [Blast from Past! A 1989 Peter Brimelow column from the London Times.] 11/25/04 - The Fulford File: Thanksgiving Roundup 11/23/05 - VDARE.COM Wishes Everybody A Happy Thanksgiving 11/22/06 - The Fulford File Happy Thanksgiving From VDARE.com! (While It Lasts)
11/21/07 - The Fulford File: The Thanksgiving Of A
Grateful Nation—And The Ingratitude Of A Few 11/26/08 - The Fulford File, By James Fulford The War Against Thanksgiving |
